Biographical encyclopedia
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366 [554] DARWIN
DARWIN [554] natural selection saw to it that the neck continued to get longer very slowly. This view explained the giraffe’s blotched coat just as well. Even Lamarck couldn’t have made a case in favor of the giraffe trying to be blotched. How ever, a giraffe that happened to be blotch- ier by random variation would better blend in with a blotched forest back ground and would the more likely escape the eyes of prowling predators. It would leave more descendants to inherit its blotchiness. The chief difficulty about all this was that it was hard to see how the random variations would carry over from genera tion to generation. There would be mat ings among creatures that varied differently, and for all Darwin knew these variations should then level out into an undistinguished average. Darwin never was completely satisfied on this point, but he went on. Some creatures, among whom the male had very conspicuous coloring, did offer a way out, at least with respect to certain prominent characteristics. The female of the species must deliberately select the most flamboyant male she could find as her mate. There it was no question of averaging out. The development of the peacock would be driven constantly in the direction of flamboyance as the re sult of “sexual selection.” Darwin also collected data on vestiges, that is, the useless remnants of tissues that bespoke full-scale useful organs eons before. For instance whales and snakes have useless scraps of bones that might once have formed parts of hip girdles and hind legs, showing that they were descendants of creatures that had walked on all fours. A horse has a single line of bones down its leg ending in a single hoof, but on either side are two thin splints that come to a dead end, but show that the horse might once have been a three-hooved creature. Darwin was a painstaking perfec tionist, collecting and classifying his in formation endlessly. In 1844 he started a book on the subject but so ardently did he continue to multiply his examples and tighten his reasoning that in 1858 he was still working at it. Fortunately he was a man of independent means and could work on such a nonremunerative project as slowly and as thoroughly as he liked. His friends knew what he was doing, and Lyell in particular was constantly urging him to publish or face being an ticipated, for evolutionary notions were in the air. Darwin could not be hurried and Lyell was proved right; Darwin was antici pated. Another naturalist, Wallace [643], wrote a paper embodying Darwin’s no tions almost to the letter and then sent a copy to none other than Darwin himself for his opinion. When Darwin received the manuscript he was thunderstruck. However, he proceeded to behave like the ideal scientist. He made no attempt to publish quickly in order to reserve the credit for himself. Magnanimously he passed on Wallace’s work to other im portant scientists and might have aban doned his own priority, had not Lyell insisted that he offer to collaborate with Wallace on papers summarizing their combined conclusions. Wallace was equally generous and cheerfully agreed, in view of Darwin’s prior claim. The col laboration was carried through and work by both men appeared in the Journal of the Linnaean Society in 1858. (How Linnaeus [276] would have turned in his grave if he knew that the society named for him bore so intimate a connection with the Darwinian theory.) But it was no longer possible to delay. The next year Darwin published his book. It was quite a long one, but it was only a fifth as long as he had been plan ning and for the rest of his life he re ferred to it disparagingly as an abstract. The full title of the book (one of the most world-shaking ever published) is
It is usually known simply as The Origin of Species. The learned world was waiting for the book. Only 1,250 copies were printed and every one was snapped up on the first day of publication. It went through printing after printing, and it is still being reprinted now, a century later. It is one of the classics of science. 367 [554] DARWIN
LIOUVILLE [555] (Ironically, within a decade of the publication of the book Mendel [638] was to carry through a course of re search that shored up the weakest point in the theory, the manner in which ran dom variations were inherited. Darwin, however, was never to know of this work, nor did the world of science gen erally until De Vries [792] rediscovered Mendel and his conclusions a generation later.)
Darwin’s book started a violent con troversy that lasted for generations. It was viewed as contrary to the statements of the Bible by some and many sincerely believed that the Darwinian theory of evolution was destructive of religion. Even among scientists the fight was bit ter.
In England, for instance, Richard Owen [539] was a die-hard opponent and in 1865, when Darwin received the Copley medal of the Royal Society, it was for his other achievements, and not for his theory of evolution. Darwin himself was not tempera mentally suited to enter the lists of con troversy. For one thing, he was too gen tle. He was the kindest of men and inca pable of the hurly-burly of polemical warfare. (One of the reasons he spent so many years gathering evidence was in a vain effort to make the case so ironclad as to avoid controversy.) Fortunately, fighting for him was Huxley [659], who called himself “Darwin’s bulldog.” In Germany, Haeckel [707] took up the Darwinian struggle against the oppo sition of Virchow [632], and in America, Asa Gray [562] fought for Darwin against the opposition of Agassiz [551]. Naturally one of the touchiest points about Darwinian evolution was its possi ble application to man himself. Darwin had skirted that point in The Origin of Species, but Lyell, whose geological views had so influenced Darwin a gener ation before, now returned the compli ment. In a book entitled The Antiquity of Man, published in 1863, Lyell came out strongly in favor of Darwinism and discussed the many thousands of years during which man, or manlike creatures, must have existed on the earth. He used as his evidence stone tools found in an cient strata by men such as Boucher de Perthes [458]. Wallace doubted that evolution could apply to man, but Darwin did not. He took his stand at Lyell’s side and in 1871 published The Descent of Man, in which he discussed evidence showing man to have descended from subhuman forms of life. For one thing, man contains many vestigial organs. There are traces of points on the incurved flaps of the outer ear, dating back to a time when the ear was upright and pointed, and there are tiny, useless muscles still pres ent that were once designed to move those ears. (Some people still can.) There are four bones at the bottom of the spine which are remnants of a tail, and so on. The world of science, at least, was won over before long and by the time of Darwin’s death the notion of evolution by natural selection had scored a clear victory. The opponents that remained were not scientists but were for the most part members of the more literal word- of-the-Bible sects. These fought a rear guard action that made newspaper head lines on occasion but did not affect the progress of biological science. Darwin was rated above controversy at his death and buried in Westminster Abbey, among England’s heroes and near Newton [231] and Faraday [474], as well as his friend Lyell. However, this burial in Westminster Abbey was the only honor ever granted him by the ul trarespectable government of Great Brit ain under Queen Victoria. The great British prime ministers William Glad stone and Benjamin Disraeli were both strongly opposed to Darwinism. Disraeli, indeed, coined a famous phrase when he said that, if asked to choose between apes and angels as the forebears of man, “I am on the side of the angels.” [555] LIOUVILLE, Joseph (lyoo-veelO French mathematician Born: St. Omer, Pas-de-Calais, March 24, 1809 Died: Paris, September 8, 1882 Liouville was the son of an army officer. He was briefly involved in poli-
[556] GRASSMAN
HENLE [557] tics after the revolution of 1848, but was defeated for election to the legislature. From 1831 he had been teaching mathe matics at the Collège de France in Paris, attaining professorial rank in 1833. He was also the editor of the Journal de
he failed in politics. Mathematics needed him more. He proved that there were numbers that were transcendental; that is, they could not serve as solutions to any polynomial equation. However, he could not identify any specific number as tran scendental. The closest he could come was a conclusion that involved the quan tity e, an irrational number for which the approximate value is 2.7182818284 . . . Liouville showed, in 1844, that nei ther e nor e2 could be the solution to any polynomial equation of the second de gree.
It was Hermite [641] who went on, a generation later, to show that e and ex pressions containing e could not be the solution to any polynomial equation of any degree. [556] GRASSMAN, Hermann Gunther (grahs'mahn) German mathematician Bom: Stettin, Pomerania (now Szczecin, Poland), April 15, 1809 Died: Stettin, September 26, 1877 Grassman was the son of a minister- mathematician and himself studied theol ogy and turned to mathematics. He got a teaching post at the high school level in 1832 and two years later qualified as minister. He did not serve as a clergy man, however, for his teaching posts ad vanced in importance and mathematics won out. By 1840 he was working en tirely on mathematical research. In 1844, Grassman published a book on mathematics that showed how one might symbolize geometry in more gen eral ways than was made possible by the ordinary analytic geometry of Descartes [183]. Involved was the algebraic manip ulation of lines and planes in a field that came to be called vector analysis. What’s more, Grassman did not confine himself to the ordinary three dimensions of the universe but spoke of abstract spaces of any number of dimensions, thus begin ning the study of n-dimensional geome try. Unfortunately, Grassman wrote ob scurely and invented a novel symbolism of his own. Furthermore, he was soon to be outglittered by the independent and even more general work of Hamilton [545], Rather disappointed in the failure of the mathematical world to appreciate his work, Grassman turned to Sanskrit and by 1862 worked in that field exclusively, preparing Sanskrit dictionaries, translat ing Sanskrit classics, and so on. This work met with instant success in its field. [557] HENLE, Friedrich Gustav Jakob (henluh)
German pathologist and anatomist Born: Fürth, Bavaria, July 19, 1809
Died: Göttingen, May 13, 1885 Henle was the son of a Jewish mer chant but when he was twelve, the fam ily accepted Protestant Christianity and young Henle thought for a while of becoming a minister. He met Johannes Müller [522] socially, however, and that helped turn his attention to medicine. He studied medicine at the universities of Heidelberg and of Bonn and obtained his medical degree in 1832, thereafter serving as assistant to Müller in Berlin. He obtained a professorial appointment at Zürich in Switzerland, where he gladly retired for safety after his liberal views had brought him to trial for treason in Berlin and a short period of imprison ment. Later he taught at Heidelberg and at Göttingen. He made numerous microanatomical discoveries, of which the best known is that of Henle’s loop, a portion of the kidney tubule. In 1846 he published a book on pathology, which for the first time unified that study of diseased tissue with the physiology of normal tissue. Virchow [632] was soon to carry this down to the cellular stage. 369 [558] HOLMES
VALENTIN [560] In 1840 Henle suggested that disease was caused by the activity of microor ganisms. However, he had no evidence in favor of this revolutionary notion and it remained only a speculation. When twenty years later Pasteur [642] came to the same conclusion, his work with silk worms had given him strong evidence in its favor and he went on to gather more, so that Pasteur rightly gets the credit for the discovery of the “germ theory.” [558] HOLMES, Oliver Wendell American author and physician Born: Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 29, 1809 Died: Boston, Massachusetts, October 7, 1894 Holmes, a Harvard graduate, class of 1829 and the son of a minister, is best known as an essayist and a poet (his most famous poems are “Old Ironsides” and “The Deacon’s Masterpiece”; or, “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay”). This tends to obscure the fact that he was a competent doctor who obtained his med ical degree from Harvard in 1836, then served as professor of anatomy first at Dartmouth College and from 1847 at Harvard.
In 1842, between his two professorial stints, he discovered the contagiousness of childbed fever, taking up much the position that Semmelweiss [607] was to take a few years later. Holmes had to withstand much abuse for this, as Sem melweiss would have to do, but Holmes was far more fortunate for he lived to see himself justified. When ether made its debut as a pain killer it was Holmes—approached for the purpose by a group of Boston doc tors—who suggested “anesthesia” as an appropriate term for the process. It is from Greek words meaning “no feeling.” In 1910 Holmes was elected a member of the Hall of Fame for Great Ameri cans.
His son and namesake (1841-1935) was one of the great Supreme Court jus tices and outdid his father—in fields out side science. [559] RAWLINSON, Sir Henry Cres- wicke
English archaeologist Bom: Chadlington, Oxfordshire, April 11, 1810 Died: London, March 5, 1895 Rawlinson went to India in 1827 in the employ of the East India Company and in 1833 was sent to Persia where he was assigned to help reorganize the Per sian army. While in Persia he grew interested in one of the great monumental antiquities of the land, a trilingual cuneiform in scription high on a cliffside at Bisitun. As it turned out, it was an inscription placed there by Darius I (who reigned over the vast Persian Empire in 500 b . c .)
detailing the circumstances by which he had gained the throne. The same message was given in Old Persian, Assyrian, and Elamitic. It was not till 1846 that Rawlinson managed to smooth away all the fac tional infighting and gained permission to investigate the inscription. He scaled the almost unscalable cliff at great per sonal risk and copied the inscription. He deciphered it, making use of modern Persian as a guide, and thus provided historians with what was, in effect, a dic tionary of the earlier languages of Meso potamia. Rawlinson’s work was steadily ex panded and it opened the history of the Near East to modem man as Cham- pollion’s similar work on hieroglyphics had done for the history of Egypt. Rawlinson resigned from the East India Company in 1855 and was knighted. He spent the rest of his life in London, serving in Parliament on two occasions and being made a baronet in 1891.
[560] VALENTIN, Gabriel Gustav (vah'len-teen) German-Swiss physiologist
Wroclaw, Poland), July 8, 1810 Died: Bern, Switzerland, May 24, 1883
370 [561] REGNAULT
GRAY [562] Valentin was the son of a silverware merchant who was also an assistant rabbi. Valentin entered the University of Breslau in 1828, studied medicine, and obtained his medical degree in 1833. His father died at about this time and Valen tin had to establish a practice to earn a living though his heart was in research. Purkinje [452] had been one of his teachers at the medical school and with him Valentin stole what time he could for microscopic studies. Thus in 1834 he and Purkinje discovered that certain cells in the inner surface of the oviduct con tained cilia, tiny threadlike structures that beat in coordinated fashion indepen dently of the nervous system and thus force the ovum to move along the tube. They investigated the occurrence of cil iated cells elsewhere among vertebrates. In 1835 Valentin and Purkinje quar reled over the use of a microscope and separated. Valentin’s papers had given him enough prestige to receive a post as professor of physiology at the University of Bern in 1836. He was the first Jew to gain a professorial post in a German-lan guage university (even though the uni versity was not in Germany itself). He was also the first Jew to be granted citi zenship of the city of Bern. In 1844 he was the first person to note the digestive activity of pancreatic juice. [561] REGNAULT, Henri Victor (reh- nyoh')
French chemist and physicist Born: Aix-la-Chapelle, France (now Aachen, West Germany), July 21, 1810
19, 1878 Regnault’s father, an army officer, died in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia when the child was two, and his mother died soon after. Régnault worked in a drapery estab lishment during his teenage years. He managed to eke out a college education studying under Liebig [532], among others. Among his chemical discoveries was that of carbon tetrachloride, which he was the first to prepare. In 1840 he succeeded Gay-Lussac [420] at the École Polytechnique, and the following year he succeeded Dulong [441] at the Collège de France. Régnault was a careful experimenter but no theoretician and the delicate mea surements he gathered were left to bear fruit for others. For instance, in 1852 he showed that gases do not quite follow Boyle’s [212] law and thus paved the way for Van der Waals [726] to modify that law a generation later. He calculated the exact change of gas volume with temperature so that he could state that absolute zero (the significance of which Kelvin [652] was to elucidate) was at —273°C.
He refined Lavoisier’s [334] experi ments on measuring the oxygen uptake and carbon dioxide production of ani mals and in 1849 calculated the first good ratios of what came to be called the respiratory quotient. This prepared the way for the work of Voit [691], Pet- tenkofer [612], and Rubner [848]. He kept measuring to the end but the records of his last voluminous group of measurements on the heat developed by expanding gases were destroyed during the disorders in Paris following the disas trous war with Prussia in 1870. (His son was killed in those same disorders.) Re gnault’s work was the forerunner of the physical chemistry that came to full life with Ostwald [840], [562] GRAY, Asa American botanist Born: Sauquoit, New York, November 18, 1810 Died: Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 30, 1888 Gray obtained his medical degree at Fairfield Academy in 1831 but practiced only briefly. Instead he devoted himself to his hobby of botany. He wrote nu merous popular books on the subject and also helped write more elaborate works on North American flora. He was in correspondence with Dar win [554], whom he had met in 1851.
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